Whole Foods CEO: ObamaCare “more like fascism”

posted at 2:31 pm on January 16, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

Three years ago, John Mackey angered many of his Whole Foods consumer base by equating ObamaCare with socialism and arguing that health-care reform should use capitalism as a lever for real improvement. Now, however, the CEO and co-founder of the health-food chain wants to clarify his earlier comments. Technically, ObamaCare is actually an example of another kind of government altogether:

What he doesn’t think is right is President Obama’s health overhaul and the new costs that coverage requirements will place on businesses.

When Inskeep asks him if he still thinks the health law is a form of socialism, as he’s said before, Mackey responds:

“Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.”

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

I’m sure that the Obama administration and its supporters appreciate Mackey’s clarification. Like most business owners, Mackey’s concern goes beyond the costs of the bill, but also to the ambiguity of those costs. The Miami Herald reported yesterday that House and Senate committees have begun hearings on both costs and ambiguity, and that no one can accurately determine the impact ObamaCare will have on their businesses:

But the Senate select committee also heard concerns from employers about how coverage requirements and penalties in the law could drive up costs for businesses. The concerns center, at least in part, on small businesses that have struggled in recent years with increasing health-insurance premiums.

“I’ve got to tell you that I’m thoroughly confused,’’ said Kim Williams, president of Marpan Supply Co., a Tallahassee recycling business that has 74 employees. “I don’t know what it’s going to cost me next year.”

As for ambiguities, even HHS is having trouble figuring out what it’s supposed to do. This week, Kathleen Sebelius put off a deadline for determining the readiness of states to move forward with their exchanges, despite having no authority in the PPACA to do so:

The White House says it will give states more time to comply with the new health care law after finding that many states lag in setting up markets where millions of Americans are expected to buy subsidized private health insurance.

Under the law, the secretary of health and human services was supposed to determine “on or before Jan. 1, 2013,” whether states were prepared to operate the online markets, known as insurance exchanges.

But the secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, working with the White House, said she would waive or extend the deadline for any states that expressed interest in creating their own exchanges or regulating insurance sold through a federal exchange.

Only 17 states have received “conditional approval,” a status also not found in the law, according to a former Sebelius adviser:

Jay Angoff, a former administration official who served as a senior adviser to Ms. Sebelius, said: “There is no such thing as ‘conditional approval’ in the statute, nor is there a ‘partnership exchange’ in the statute. The federal government has the ultimate responsibility for making sure that an exchange is established in every state. So if a state that receives conditional approval is unable to do all the things it needs to do to establish an exchange by Oct. 1 — which is likely — then the federal government will run the exchange in that state.”

That will mean higher costs for ObamaCare than projected, and the potential for disruption of subsidies intended to cushion the impact of the PPACA on insurance premiums for working- and middle-class households. In truth, nearly everything about ObamaCare is immersed in ambiguities and uncertainty on costs and regulation after almost three years — and we only have less than a year to go before full implementation.

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I seem to recall facism as being more the right-wing of the left (within the context of socialism/communism i.e. left = international [world], right = nationalist [nation]) not the right-wing as commonly understood in the US as being conservative, free enterprise, and such.

In any case, the PPACA was feared and has seemed to fulfilled the concerns of a very complicated mechanism assembled from various components that is showing that the intended process is much more complicated than the designers ever imagined. Assuming they did. It is quite possible that the flawed design was (however inadvertently) intentional because that would justify even more changes to improve its operation however incrementally.

Mackey, three years ago, offered a plan for expanded healthcare coverage that could have (and should have) been adopted as the model for healthcare / insurance reform. Unfortunately the GOP is mostly populated with politically stupid men. Were it not so, they could have spent the entire run-up to Obamacare’s passage referring to “the Mackey Plan” casually, but frequently. Like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9, it would have made people say “hey, what’s that?”

no one can accurately determine the impact ObamaCare will have on their businesses

But we can say with cast-iron certainty it will have a negative impact.

We’re just really trying to judge the breadth and width and the attendant damage. It’s a bit like being shot. You know it is not optimal (h/t Lord Dogmuncher) but caliber, range, and shot placement are all highly relevant.

He’s one hundred percent correct. I don’t see how there’s any disputing it. People may wish it wasn’t so because they don’t like the way it feels, but the definition fits perfectly.

njrob on January 16, 2013 at 2:34 PM

The Hill, on the other hand, is one hundred percent wrong.

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

The only reason Nazism was re-assigned to the right side of the political spectrum is because of their emphasis on race — which is not even accurate in itself, since racism is hardly either exclusive to the right or more common on the right.

There was nothing right-wing about Mussolini or fascism in Italy at all.

This is just another example of people redefining terms to make them feel more comfortable. They don’t like fascism being associated with the left, so they try to shove it off on the right.

But playing so fast and loose with the terms “right” and “left” leaves us with a dog’s breakfast. Nazism was totalitarian, socialist, and the people existed for the benefit of the state. The only big difference between Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy was the German emphasis in designating themselves as the master race. And even that was the sort of eugenics that has been often found on the left.

Well after all, Barack Obama, he’s an ordinary liberty grabbing fascist man
Who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance
To make all people live exactly as he wishes, and do precisely what he wants…
An average fascist man is he, of no especially clever whim
Who wants to control everyone else’s life
While he goes golfing or on yet another royal vacation with his beastly wife
With everyone supinely doing whatever he commands
Well… just an ordinary fascist man is he …

This is interesting, since I seem to recall AP losing patience with people who called Obama a fascist.

He is, in fact, a fascist, regardless of whether you believe him to be a “jack-booted thug.” Fascism always leads to repression, because it must. Government control always means government force, so fascism is inextricably tied to big government.

Heritage Foundation Ranks Countries With Government-Run Health Care As The Freest In World

Damn reality and it’s liberal bias.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:39 PM

The TP article you link contains a link to this. It explains that the Heritage Economic freedom index measures a very narrow set of economic considerations and is not a measure of countries that are broadly the “Freest in the World”. You statement is a bit mistaken or dishonest according to your sources.

There was nothing right-wing about Mussolini or fascism in Italy at all.

This is just another example of people redefining terms to make them feel more comfortable. They don’t like fascism being associated with the left, so they try to shove it off on the right.

But playing so fast and loose with the terms “right” and “left” leaves us with a dog’s breakfast. Nazism was totalitarian, socialist, and the people existed for the benefit of the state. The only big difference between Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy was the German emphasis in designating themselves as the master race. And even that was the sort of eugenics that has been often found on the left.

tom on January 16, 2013 at 2:49 PM

Exactly right. Ask Italian immigrants who either were from Italy during WWII or their parents were. He was a left wing dictator. But loved by many of his people because “the trains ran on time.” He had the cult of personality like the current White House occupant.

Mackey, three years ago, offered a plan for expanded healthcare coverage that could have (and should have) been adopted as the model for healthcare / insurance reform. Unfortunately the GOP is mostly populated with politically stupid men. Were it not so, they could have spent the entire run-up to Obamacare’s passage referring to “the Mackey Plan” casually, but frequently. Like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9, it would have made people say “hey, what’s that?”

SAMinVA on January 16, 2013 at 2:48 PM

As I’ve always said, politicians are usually people who have failed in the private sector. They go to work in gov’t because they can get away with being incompetent as long as they smile a lot, look good, speak reasonably clearly, and tell people what they want to hear.

The problem with the GOP is that they are nowhere near as good at telling people what they want to hear as Democrats are. That’s why they keep losing.

1: Admit free healthcare is paragon of freest economies in the world as they rank at the very top of Heritage’s freedom index.

2: Attack me and Think Progress and avoid the admission.

You picked 2! Like a good conservative.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:51 PM

Communist scum low IQ lester:

Free healthcare does not equate to economic freedom and you are relating apples to oranges you little f***… Since Obama the socialist became President the United States economic freedom dropped every single year… That is the undisputed fact you little low life communist scum and slave of the State.

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

Set the countdown clock. Chris Mathews, Toure, Colin Powell, & Soledad will soon be explaining why John Mackey is a racist. Fascism = Nazi = Obamacare = Racist. Therefore anyone who does not like Obamacare is a racist by definition. Wish this was a joke

Yes, and that’s irrelevant here. Most of the countries that Heritage calls freest economies are practically communist or at “best” massively socialist countries by 2012 American conservative measures. It’s not just one single healthcare policy.

The Democrats are building a cesspool of fascist socialism that will destroy us if they’re not fought at every turn.

rplat on January 16, 2013 at 3:01 PM

We are making a big biiiiiig mistake calling it ” fascism” or
” socialism” or even ” nazism” because a very large chunk of our population actually desires to live under such regimes and they don’t see anything wrong with fascism when they see it through their hatred for America . That is why they worship Idi Hussein.
But these people are being fooled by their emir , because although his tactics and language is marxist, his intent and goals are islamic.
We know it. When will his people realize that ?

Only a complete Idiot, with capital I, could ever claim that free health care is any envy anywhere? Just ask all the leaders in communist run countries where do they go when they need health care. They all travel West.

You and all other Idiots like you should go live in Russia and Cuba to understand what “free health care” really means.

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

Weird, ‘cuz the LEFT WING in the UNITED STATES LOVED FASCISM…until WWII.

Just as Progressives were generally enthusiastic about socialist movements in the Soviet Union and Europe, they were also overwhelmingly supportive of the Fascist movements in Italy and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. In many respects the founding fathers of modern liberalism, the men and women who laid the intellectual groundwork of the New Deal and the welfare state, thought that Fascism sounded like … a worthwhile ‘experiment':

“The Fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and are of particular interest at this time.”

-FDR’s National Recovery Act Study

“It’s the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious…I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary…. Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has.”

– Rexford Guy Tugwell, FDR adviser

“[The Roosevelt administration is] trying out the economics of Fascism.”

– George Soule, New Republic editor and avid supporter of FDR

“Mussolini is a Latin Teddy Roosevelt.”

– Isaac F. Marcosson, New York Times

“I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”

– H. G. Wells, one of the most influential Progressives of the 20th century, who said of totalitarianism: “I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic.”

“He (Mussolini) stands out like a Modern Caesar – the answer to America’s needs.”

– Lowell Thomas, a Progressive journalist and the journalist in Lawrence of Arabia

“Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism…Fascism is an amazing experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism.”

– Charles Beard, eminent Progressive historian

“I stand in wonder…as a Bolshevik. There is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector….

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left….

It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.

1: Admit free healthcare is paragon of freest economies in the world as they rank at the very top of Heritage’s freedom index.

2: Attack me and Think Progress and avoid the admission.

You picked 2! Like a good conservative.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:51 PM

There is no such thing as “free” healthcare. You just pay for it differently.

For example, in the UK, you might not pay at the hospital, but you pay in other ways. Let’s look at the tax burden of a senior nurse:

A senior level nurse in a London hospital earns approximately $49,000. She will pay around $10,500 in income taxes, $6,039 in National Insurance taxes, a 20% VAT, council taxes, and other assorted taxes…in an area where it is more expensive to live than in Manhattan or San Francisco.

What Think Progress will never tell you is that the income tax systems in countries with socialised medicine are FAR LESS PROGRESSIVE than that existing in the United States.

Yes, and that’s irrelevant here. Most of the countries that Heritage calls freest economies are practically communist or at “best” massively socialist countries by 2012 American conservative measures. It’s not just one single healthcare policy.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 3:19 PM

Communist scum low IQ lester:

Did you check these countries corperate taxes and business regulations? That what it means economic freedom index… it is the ease to open a business with the least amount of regulations and taxes and has nothing to do with f***ing government run healthcare… Check this chart in the link below idiot… The US has the highest corporate taxes in the industrial world and with socialist Obama adding more regulations on businesses it is no wonder that we are going down in the economic freedom…

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

Mussolini was a Communist who added Italian fetishism to Marxism.

The Italian Fascists called their philosophy “Totalitarianism,” in that the state must be an integral part of the whole (total) of society.

Stalin decreed that any socialists that did not acknowledge the supremacy of Stalinism (making a fetish out of Russian socialism) was to be referred to as a Fascist.

Mackey, three years ago, offered a plan for expanded healthcare coverage that could have (and should have) been adopted as the model for healthcare / insurance reform. Unfortunately the GOP is mostly populated with politically stupid men. Were it not so, they could have spent the entire run-up to Obamacare’s passage referring to “the Mackey Plan” casually, but frequently. Like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9, it would have made people say “hey, what’s that?”

SAMinVA on January 16, 2013 at 2:48 PM

Mackey’s plan is already in widespread use, he didn’t come up with the concept at all of a high deductible plan with an HSA.

Lots of states have used this model as well, and as a practicing doc, I can vouch it’s the only plan that contains costs well without rationing

Gov Mitch Daniels, for example, changed Indiana’s Medicaid program to the exact same model years ago– and with great success as far as cost savings and patient satisfaction.

So of course Obamacare has told Indiana to abandon it and go back to the traditional, wasteful Medicaid model that everyone hates

Heritage Foundation Ranks Countries With Government-Run Health Care As The Freest In World

Damn reality and it’s liberal bias.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:39 PM

Singapore’s “government-run healthcare” is far more free market based than Obamacare, the NHS, or Canada’s Medicare.

One of the primary reasons the health care costs in the US have skyrocketed is that the consumer is divorced from the payor. When FDR imposed wage controls during the war, employers started offering health insurance as an inducement either to come work for or remain with them. The US was unique in this, and still is. Unfortunately, as decades of data prove, when a third-party is paying medical bills, people do not care about costs.

The problem with All-You-Can-Consume Buffet HealthCare either government-provided or through insurance is that when people are not paying for services, they do not care how much they cost. For example, if you are going out to dinner and paying yourself, you choose carefully. If the owner provides anything that you want for free or a very minimal cost, then you order 7 courses with a different wine for each.

The opposite of All-You-Can-Consume Buffet Healthcare and the impact on containing health care costs is Singapore. As a country, Singapore spends 50% LESS than any country in the EU. Individuals spend less than half on insurance premiums than individuals in any industrialised country. How does this effect longevity? People in Singapore live longer, healthier lives than anyone in the EU, Australia, Canada or America.

In Singapore, everyone is covered. The system is based on health savings accounts and catastrophic insurance coverage. 64% of all healthcare spending is done by individuals, which should be compared by the 13% in the US and 7% in France. People can choose their own doctors. They negotiate prices for treatment with healthcare providers for routine and non-catastrophic conditions. There are no waiting times nor rationing.

Singapore is night as the NHS, Canada’s Medicare, and Obamacare are day.

The term “fascism” was first used to describe the right-wing regime of Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and was later applied to the Nazis and the authoritarian leadership of Francisco Franco in Spain.

The only reason Nazism was re-assigned to the right side of the political spectrum is because of their emphasis on race — which is not even accurate in itself, since racism is hardly either exclusive to the right or more common on the right.

There was nothing right-wing about Mussolini or fascism in Italy at all.

This is just another example of people redefining terms to make them feel more comfortable. They don’t like fascism being associated with the left, so they try to shove it off on the right.

But playing so fast and loose with the terms “right” and “left” leaves us with a dog’s breakfast. Nazism was totalitarian, socialist, and the people existed for the benefit of the state. The only big difference between Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy was the German emphasis in designating themselves as the master race. And even that was the sort of eugenics that has been often found on the left.

tom on January 16, 2013 at 2:49 PM

Well put. The American Left in the twenties and thirties was very impressed with European Fascism, especially the Italian variety. We had our own American Mussolini, -Woodrow Wilson.

The reassignment of Fascism to the right of the political spectrum was done because of that inconvenient holocaust, which made Fascism radioactive in the West. Because of the war, the Western Left had to choose between favoring nominally German and Italian socialism and Soviet socialism, and they chose the Soviet label.

I spent the weekend trying to work through a recent 144-page IRS PROPOSAL about what would be classified as a full-time worker vs a part-time worker. These are proposals, mind you; the IRS can’t actually answer the question with certainty because it wasn’t in the law. Here’s the kicker: in 2014, when Obamacare kicks in, they will look back at 2013 employment records to decide who employers have to cover. Employers today can’t know where to draw the line because the line DOESN’T EXIST YET. So, the IRS has told businesses to take a guess and hope they get it right.

Ask Italian immigrants who either were from Italy during WWII or their parents were. He was a left wing dictator. But loved by many of his people because “the trains ran on time.” He had the cult of personality like the current White House occupant.”

IIRC, the trains bit was pure propaganda to bolster Mussolini. In fact, the trains weren’t on time all that much, and when they were it was due to policy and decisions predating Mussolini, but for which he was glad to take credit, much like Barry enjoys taking credit for things not of his making.

Heritage Foundation Ranks Countries With Government-Run Health Care As The Freest In World

Damn reality and it’s liberal bias.

lester on January 16, 2013 at 2:39 PM

I’m glad you brought this up.

All you’ve done is emphasise the correctness of the Whole Foods CEO’s statements. In terms of economic freedom we are now to the left of European basket cases.

Of course northern Europeans aren’t deluded about the economic and personal fiscal demands of a super state. They know that the middle class must bear the biggest burden because that’s were all the money is.
When they vote themselves cradle to grave entitlements and “income inequality” they expect to pay through the nose for it. Here in America we have the European sized government (and in a lot of cases a federal bureacracy much bigger and more intrusive than they are) but we don’t have European sized middle class taxes.

lester, it’s time for your violin lesson! on January 16, 2013 at 3:22 PM

And yet you still ignore that your Think Progress piece states up front that the Heritage study uses misleading Right Wing language. And endorse you it anyway, simply because it fits your simplistic agenda.

But hey, it’s nice to see a Dim Bulb Leftist like yourself cite Heritage. By doing so, you’re also endorsing their positions on other things, like the following:

The Italian Fascists called their philosophy “Totalitarianism,” in that the state must be an integral part of the whole (total) of society.

Stalin decreed that any socialists that did not acknowledge the supremacy of Stalinism (making a fetish out of Russian socialism) was to be referred to as a Fascist.

Akzed on January 16, 2013 at 3:33 PM

Exactamundo. Mussolini and later Hitler were both hard core Marxist revolutionaries who didn’t exactly go out of their way to hide their militant left wing roots. It was the Stalinists who came up the idea of calling national socialists “right wing” as a way to discredit what was quickly becoming a far more popular movement than what the Bolsheviks horked up.

The smear stuck. Today most people equate “fascist” and “right wingers” with charismatic figures who pompously strut around in military garb while denouncing various enemies of the state, burning books, invading their neighbors, and carting off millions to die in concentration camps. Never mind that the Communists on the “left wing” were not only doing the very same thing, but did it decades before and after the fascists were defeated in 1945.

Today’s Progressives, of which Obama and his clique draw a great deal of popular support, exhibit many of the same characteristics as past Marxists, but instead of adopting the tactics of militant revolutionaries, they’ve chosen a more evolutonary path. Their goal of transforming the United States is based on decades of patient planning. Obama is simply closing several Overton Windows so that he can open some more.

There was nothing right-wing about Mussolini or fascism in Italy at all.

This is just another example of people redefining terms to make them feel more comfortable. They don’t like fascism being associated with the left, so they try to shove it off on the right.

tom on January 16, 2013 at 2:49 PM

The leftist idiots who call fascism “right-wing” would have us believe that fascists are Jeffersonians who believe in free markets and a well-armed population – these idiots tell us that 0dumba isn’t a manipulative narcissist, and that his governmental intrusion into Chrysler and GM were not fascistic.

Well after all, Barack Obama, he’s an ordinary liberty grabbing fascist man
Who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance
To make all people live exactly as he wishes, and do precisely what he wants…
An average fascist man is he, of no especially clever whim
Who wants to control everyone else’s life
While he goes golfing or on yet another royal vacation with his beastly wife
With everyone supinely doing whatever he commands
Well… just an ordinary fascist man is he …

I was going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. Excellent book, by the way, and worth having in one’s library.

PatriotGal2257 on January 16, 2013 at 7:09 PM

Romney and the Heritage Foundation, the GOP think tank that Rush Limbaugh is always touting, were the architects of Romneycare, the model for Obamacare. In other words the reason that Obamacare is fascist is because he basically copied it from the right-wing, specifically Romney and Heritage. So it’s simply not true that fascism is only left-wing; it’s both.

mackey actually did not want and spoke out against obamacare at the time- and was hammered by the left for doing so. hence him now being somewhat cagey about the word ‘socialism’- because obamacare is evil it must therefore be of the right not the left. because hippies are stupid.

socialism is always fascism because it is contrary to human nature therefore ‘socialism’ has to be forced upon a free people by a government, usually a jackbooted police state. or you dumb them down for a few generations in the public schools, expand the ‘welfare state’ until it becomes a set of ‘ entitlements’( a right similar to those enumerated in the bill of rights) make vast swathes of them dependent on the government then try to bludgeon the rest of the population into compliance (in part by turning flash mobs and hippie-hobo camps of ignorant feral youths upon the law abiding, by emptying out the prisons and taking all the guns away from the law abiding…)- Barry Dearest’s route apparently. for all their swoony love of particular political theories and practices, liberals know absolutely nothing about history or the writings of the theorists they’re enamored with. it’s as if most of them never heard of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

only to me obama and the likes of liz warren don’t exactly resemble the ‘proletariat’.

What Obama and the government eventually did with Obamacare and what Heritage proposed in the 1990s are two different things.

Fascism is truly left-wing. Again, as others have said here, as well as Jonah Goldberg in his book, it was the Left who disassociated themselves from Fascism and successfully made it stick as a concept to discredit the Right. It’s yet another instance where a person needs to examine critically everything the Left says, because ten times out of ten, they are being fundamentally dishonest and can never be trusted.

But small government conservatives can relax, they are not right-wingers, (although people like Jonah have tried to convince them that they are and that it’s OK), in fact small-gov conservatives are much closer to the center of politics than statists on the far-left and far-right like Obama and Romney. Small-gov conservatives aren’t fascists, neither are classical-liberal types on the left, it’s Romney, Obama and others like them that are the culprits. People like them have spent decades teaching people that the extremists of yesteryear are the moderates now and that the old moderates are the extremists. That’s how it came to be that common sense solutions, like cutting spending and balancing the budget, are considered “extreme”.

i’m the last one to defend mitt-mittens over the smoldering socialist heap that is romneycare but he wanted not a mandate to buy insurance but proof of a healthcare savings account in a specific amount- overridden by democrats. or so his willardness stated at the time.

despite this i still think romneycare was the template for obamacare and that it’s unconstitutional fascist play for single payer. romney may have opted for an R after his name but his actions show he’s leftist all the way when it comes to ‘health care’. there’s nothing whatsoever conservative about forcing people against their will into a contract with a private business over the care of their own bodies- ie the government dictating how one sees to one’s own body.